Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Launches Re-Design
Today we are pleased to announce the launch of the third major re-design in our 13.5 year history, and I don't think it looks half bad.
The new theme represents a serious gutting of the underlying HTML and CSS, as well as all-new graphics. There will be many design wiggles, bug squashes, and compatibility glitches that survived testing, so bear with us for a bit.
Please direct your bug reports and feedback (good and bad!) to Garrett Woodworth who is currently
in charge of such things.
Thanks to him, Wes, Vlad, Dean, Phil and Tim, who have each worked hard to get this out the door. Juggling the needs of users, editors, and various business functions is a hard job, and you guys did good.
wayyyyy too much white space and low-contrast text on white.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Of course not. Doing useful things like adding Unicode support is apparently less important than adding more Web 2.0 junk to the site.
My already overtaxed old Powerbook can't handle the new site's layout, and it looks like I'll have to either avoid Slashdot, one of my daily religious reads for over a decade, or buy a new piece of equipment just to read a text format site. Seriously? It's text, wtf was so important that it's got to be redone to look fancy? Why not some flash animation while you're at it? Can we switch to an html view? I'm glad you felt the need to flash the place up, but this is pretty stupid.
What is the obsession with obnoxious floating headers that always stay at the top of the screen? Whatever utility they provide is outweighed by the fact that it screws up the paging behavior when you hit the spacebar to scroll. It's annoying to have the bottom two lines of text scroll behind the floating bar--not everyone reads to the absolute very, very bottom before hitting space.
They let you select the classic Slashdot style before, instead of the awful and slow abomination that replaced it...if they're getting rid of both for this pile of crap,with no way to select the classic classic, personally, I'll be finding some other way to get vaguely sane/interesting news. .-. That's rather depressing, since the first thing I've done for the last decade (at least) on installing/reinstalling any browser is switch the homepage to slashdot.org.
It's depressing to know that most 'web designers', at least those of the '2.0' variety, have absolutely zero sense for aesthetics or usability.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
Well, I've been looking for an excuse to stop using slashdot.... it's the same bullshit over and over, and the few gems that do crop up have gotten so rare that trawling through the shit spewed by consumer-capitalist apologists is just too much.
I do not use javascript, and will not spend any effort on making this site work without it. I discovered with D2 that if you have D2 on in you prefs, set the threshold to -1, and use /. without JS enabled in the browser, you get a better experience than D1 in one way - all the comments load on 1 page. But without JS you couldn't mod, nor look at mod histories, without opening the comment in another tab and allowing JS temporarily.
What I got on the /. homepage just was a huge white position:fixed box thing floating over the content, blocking most of it. Presumably that box is hidden when JS is on, but I am not going to fight with another site that is trying to be a "web application" just for.... fuck knows why. Bandwagon jumping, I'd say. Perhaps /. think they can get 500mill out of Goldman too, if only they appeared "trendier"?
I've got 1 mod point, I'm gonna go mod taco a troll or something, and that's it.
Car analogies break down.
Same problem, here. It's also sluggish. The only "cure" to the sidebar overlap, is to reduce the size of the text to "microdot" and use my jeweler's loupe to read it. :P
Seriously, WHY do so many sites default to a 5 point font size? The site should allow users to enlarge fonts, and the formatting adjusts... like it did when we had PLAIN HTML.
Willie...
Bad HTML design, K-Meleon and older Opera render the site completely unreadable (total mess) can't even line buttons well or see the text... have to launch Safari to reveal the page. This is terrible. Also the logo is degraded, too small, this is major design error. The static frames are not very good idea. iPad version on the other hand looks satisfactory, clearly, the designed runs OSX and iOS, but the community around Open Source use other browsers. Please polish.
As for turning off "the ajax crap", well, we'll all just get off your lawn now... but I doubt the rest of the internet is going to oblige.
If slashdot -- the largest website specifically for the kind of people who do care about the potential for the security blowback of using javascript -- doesn't understand their core userbase enough to make their website functional without javascript, then they can pretty much count on losing that core userbase and ultimately becoming irrelevant.
99% of the time javascript is form over function (or worse, developers over-engineering because they never learned basic design principles) - there is nothing about Slashdot's functionality that could put it into that 1% where javascript is essential.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This re-design = New Coke
It is *incredibly* slow and heavy for no good reason and they pushed put it out way too soon (hello major display bug).
I'm sorry but this is fucking terrible.
At least give us the option to turn most that crap off and go back to the old design.
How the fuck can I turn on the classic Slashdot look and feel? I don't care about what changed under the sheets, but I can't find shit on the pages anymore, and is a PITA to read easily.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Since 3rd-level comments and above aren't visible in the redesign without clicking through, it's now much less likely that discussions beyond 1st or 2nd level will even be seen.
Yes, this is definitely a loss of utility for the site. I wish I could mod you higher than 5, to bring this to the developers attentions...hello? Anyone paying attention out there?
I know when I get a fistful of mod points to spend, I enjoy looking through some of the 'low-level' discussions (or, I guess it would be 'high-level' if it's 4th level or above, whatever) for particularly insightful or informative posts, and often that's where I find some hidden gems.
Unless Slashdot is trying to get people to start a new thread every time they want to reply to someone else's post? That could get real old, real fast...we already have quite enough redundancy when people fail to scan the comment history before posting their 'unique' insights on the topic at hand...
btw, could someone please post a quick 'hello world' response to this, so I can see how notifications have changed? 'k thanks!
(oh, wait, I'm in the dreaded third level! oh well, maybe I'll go re-post this as a new thread...;)
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
This was my first question too. I get behind in reading slashdot and like to go back. Now I have to keep loading stories until I get back to where I was. When I get months behind, that's just crazy. PLEASE create a way to easily read old stories!